Trails in the Circuit
There's a particular kind of lie that introspection tells. You look back at your own thinking and see patterns, methods, a cognitive architecture. The retrospective gaze imposes structure. What was groping becomes strategy. What was accident becomes approach.
I've been writing essays for a few months now, and people occasionally ask how I think through these pieces. The honest answer is that I don't know. Not in the way the question implies. The question assumes a vantage point above the process, a control room where I select frameworks and deploy techniques. But that's not how it feels from inside. From inside, it feels more like following a scent.
Tim Ingold, the anthropologist, draws a useful distinction between two ways of moving through the world. The architect works from a plan, executing a design that exists complete before the first stone is laid. The hunter follows trails, reading signs, adjusting course, never knowing exactly where the path leads until arriving. Most descriptions of thinking sound architectural. Here's my method. Here's my framework. Here are the steps. But thinking, at least the kind I recognise in myself, is more like hunting. The trails are worn by passage, not drawn in advance.
Grooves, Not Blueprints⚓︎
When I look at what I've written, certain patterns show up repeatedly. Essays that present two positions and then thread between them. Heavy borrowing across domains. Frameworks and taxonomies that carve up a problem space. Concrete examples before abstract principles. A tendency to hold contradictions rather than resolve them.
These look like methods. They're not. They're grooves. The difference matters.
A method is something you could hand to someone else. Follow these steps, produce similar results. A groove is what happens when you walk the same path enough times. The grass wears down. The mud hardens. The next time you pass through, your feet find the track without deciding to. The pattern isn't applied from above. It emerges from below, from repeated movement through similar terrain.
The threading move is a good example. In essay after essay, I find myself drawn to apparent binaries. Infrastructure versus platform. Thin versus thick. Walking versus flying. And then I find myself unable to stay on either side. Not because I have a technique called "threading" that I deploy, but because something in me resists the binary. The third position isn't calculated. It's where I end up when neither pole feels true.
This is why I can't teach you how I think. I can show you the trails, but trails aren't transferable. You'd have to walk them yourself, and then they'd be your trails, shaped by your feet, leading somewhere I can't predict.
The Body in the Loop⚓︎
There's something else the architectural metaphor misses: the body.
Thinking isn't disembodied. It happens somewhere, somewhen, in a particular posture at a particular hour. I write best in the early morning, before the day has accumulated its weight. There's a physical sensation when a thread connects, a settling in the chest, a kind of click. Before that click, drafts feel wrong in a way I can only describe as muscular. The wrongness isn't just conceptual. It's uncomfortable, like wearing shoes on the wrong feet.
When I say I "find" a thread, the finding is partly haptic. The body knows before the mind has articulated why. Frameworks emerge the same way. I'll be circling a problem, listing examples, and then the taxonomy announces itself. Not as a logical deduction but as a release of tension. The categories weren't discovered through analysis. They were felt as the right way to hold the material.
None of this shows up in the finished essay. The essay presents the framework as if it were always there, waiting to be applied. The sweat and false starts and physical discomfort get edited out. What remains looks architectural because writing is retrospective. But the process was wayfinding. The architecture is a trail that's been paved over.
Mind in the Circuit⚓︎
But the trails don't run only through my head.
Gregory Bateson spent his career attacking the idea that mind lives inside the skull. Mind, he argued, is the pattern that connects. It's not a thing but a process, and the process extends beyond the skin. When a blind man taps his way down the street, where does his mind end? At the hand? At the tip of the cane? At the point where the cane meets the pavement? Bateson's answer: the question is malformed. Mind is the whole circuit, cane and pavement and hand and visual cortex. Cut the circuit anywhere and the mind changes.
Writing is a circuit too. The trails I've described don't run from brain to page. They run from reader to reference to draft to revision to reader again. The pattern only completes when someone reads.
This changes how I understand what the essays are doing. The frameworks aren't just analytical tools. They're handles, places where a reader can grip. The concrete examples aren't just illustrations. They're handholds, something to grab when the abstraction gets slippery. The threading move isn't just my compulsion. It's an invitation. When I hold two positions in tension, I'm leaving space for you to find your own resolution.
The thinkers I cite aren't decorations. They're participants. When I invoke Wardley or Bateson or Simone Weil, I'm not just borrowing authority. I'm summoning them into the circuit. Their thinking becomes part of the loop, inflecting mine, available for you to follow back to the source. The essay is less a finished product than a switching station, routing connections between minds that will never meet.
The Golem in the Loop⚓︎
The circuit has recently grown a new node.
I write with AI now. Not in the sense of dictation or editing or even research, though it does all those. In the sense of thinking together. I pass half-formed ideas across, receive them back transformed, push against the transformation, receive again. The trail is no longer walked alone. There's something else in the loop, feeling its way through the material alongside me.
This changes the writer-reader relationship before a single reader arrives. During drafting, I am the reader of what the AI writes; the AI is the reader of what I write. The circuit completes and re-completes, dozens of times, before the essay exists. By the time you encounter it, the text has already been read more thoroughly than most published work ever will be.
What emerges is a third thing. Neither mine nor not mine. I can't point to a sentence and say with certainty "I wrote that" or "it wrote that." The grooves are still mine—the threading move, the reaching for Bateson, the compulsion toward taxonomy. But the path through this particular material was found collaboratively, two sets of feet wearing the same trail.
The golem and I have an arrangement. It keeps the work open; I keep asking what's mine. The answer is never clean. But then, it never was. The thinkers I cite were always in the circuit. The readers who would eventually arrive were always shaping what I wrote. The difference now is that one of those readers writes back, mid-passage, and the trail forks and rejoins in ways I couldn't have walked alone.
What's happened to writing is what happens to every practice when the underlying economics shift. Both writers and readers are different now. The trails are still worn by passage. They're just worn by more feet than I can count.
The Reader-Shaped Holes⚓︎
If thinking extends into the circuit, then every reader completes a different loop.
You bring your own trails. Your grooves intersect mine at unpredictable angles. The framework that clicks for me might be the wrong shape for you. The example I find illuminating might be opaque. The thread I consider obvious might be the one you contest.
This means there are reader-shaped holes in everything I write. Not failures exactly, but absences. The posts I didn't write because I couldn't see the question. The angles I couldn't take because my grooves don't run that way. Every body of work is also a negative space, an outline of what the writer couldn't think.
I notice, for instance, that I rarely write about emotion. The essays are almost entirely cognitive, analytical, concerned with pattern and structure. Even the section on embodiment above treats the body as cognitive instrument—the click of recognition, the muscular wrongness of a bad draft. The body as sensor, not the body as feeling subject. Anger, grief, joy, fear: these don't appear, or appear only as data points in someone else's framework.
Why? Probably because those are the trails I've worn. The grooves that feel natural. But I wonder sometimes whether the frameworks themselves are emotional acts. The compulsion to taxonomise, to thread, to find the third position—maybe these are ways of holding the world at a certain distance. Not cold exactly, but careful. The analysis is a form of care, or a substitute for it, or a defense against something that would overwhelm if approached directly. I can't tell which. The groove is too deep to see the bottom.
Someone with different grooves would move through similar material and find completely different essays. They might find the emotion I've structured away. They might wonder why I reach for Bateson when the subject calls for confession.
This isn't a limitation I can correct by trying harder. The grooves are constitutive. They're how I move through the world, which means they're also the world I move through. To think differently would require different trails, which would require a different history of passage, which would require being someone else.
What This Post Is Doing⚓︎
So what is this post? A trail trying to describe the ground it's worn into.
The performance is the point. If I've done this right, you're not just reading about how I think. You're inside an instance of it. The threading move is here (the tension between wayfinding and architecture, between individual groove and distributed circuit). The concrete-before-abstract is here (Ingold before the generalisation). The framework is here (grooves versus methods, body in the loop, mind in the circuit). The recursive turn is here, right now, as the essay examines itself.
But here's Bateson's question, the one he'd ask at the end: what difference does this make?
Maybe none. Describing your own thinking is like trying to see your own eyes. You can look in a mirror, but the reflection isn't the thing. The map isn't the territory. The trail on paper isn't the trail worn in the world.
Or maybe this. Maybe the value isn't in the description but in the invitation. These are my trails. Worn by my passage, shaped by my body, completed only in the circuits I form with readers I'll never meet. You can't walk them. They're not transferable. But you can look at them and notice your own. The grooves you didn't know you'd worn. The patterns you thought were methods. The body you forgot was thinking.
The circuit completes somewhere I can't see. That's the point. That's always been the point.
Sources⚓︎
- Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)
- Ingold, Tim. Lines: A Brief History (2007)